


Other People

by Pares (kormantic)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e14 Monday, Gen, Groundhog Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-10-11
Updated: 1999-10-11
Packaged: 2017-10-29 18:40:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/Pares
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pam Driscoll and the longest day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other People

I took Skinner home once.

I mean, I drove him home, to his apartment, brought him up to the seventeenth floor... I had already stopped counting how many times I'd seen him drop to his knees when the blast came. I think I drove him home the first time he _stayed_ there, face blank, glasses dusted with grit.

Once he was bleeding; some glass had caught him above the eyebrow. I made an EMT pull the glass out and bandage it up. It wasn't the same time that I took him home, though.

I took him home more than once.

I forget how many times.

I forget more than I can remember now; it's all blurring together. I can tell you that the fat man with the gray hair had five kids. That once he kissed his wife on the shoulder before rolling out of bed to take his shower. Only once, though. Just that one time, out of the maybe six times I watched him wake up. I could see him from the ground floor window pretty easily.

I can't remember his name, or the names of any of his kids, even though I brought them a pizza once, after following the officer who'd come to report their father dead in a bombing on 8th street. The mom didn't even seem to notice me. The kids were confused. They were surprisingly young; I mean, his wife must have had them really close together. I saw a T. V. show once about how multiple births run in families. Maybe she'd had two sets of fraternal twins.

She was like the old lady in the shoe, you know? None of her kids looked like they could be brothers and sisters. Only the youngest looked anything like the father, had his curly hair. It's like when a white cat has tabby kittens, a black and white, and a calico.

She never spoke. Never said a thing. The officer told her, and every time, she'd just close the door (it was a glass door) and stand there with her hand over her mouth. The kids didn't cry, but the littlest one, he mewled, tugged on her shirt.

The day I brought them the pizza was the last day I spent with that particular guy. I think his name was Fred. Or maybe Andy.

I took Skinner home, and he never even asked me how I knew where he lived. I followed him into the elevator, and hit the button. I wiped his glasses off on my shirt.

The first time I took him home, I made him coffee, and he sat in his easy chair, and I sat on his couch and his coffee got cold and I watched the sun brighten and fade again outside his window.

Then I went back home to Bernard's apartment and thought about taking the sleeping pills I'd stolen from Mrs. Warner in 334. I counted them; there are twenty-two. Enough, I think.

But I only thought about it a little before I made myself some coffee and sat in the LayZBoy and let the coffee get cold and didn't sleep didn't sleep didn't sleep until I woke up with Bernard's arm around my waist that morning.

The same morning.

It's not going to be long now; I'm going to fall off the edge of the world real soon, I know it, and I can't seem to do anything about it.

If Mulder doesn't believe me this morning...

He doesn't believe me. He doesn't know who I am. I've told him and told him and I've told him stories about himself, because there was that time I went to the library after the explosion and did some research every day, every Monday for probably eight or ten in a row. I tell him that they're going to find out that Bernard shoots him, kills him twice over, that Mulder is probably already dead by the time the bomb goes off.

But it doesn't help.

Once, Skinner talked to me. I'd given up on coffee; I'd brought him a new bottle of Johnny Walker Black and I gave it to him in that same coffee cup and this time he drank it, and he talked.

He told me he had a niece who was about my age. His wife had had a sister. His wife had died after a car accident. Or maybe it was after an operation. He talked every time I brought him the Johnny Walker Black, but he didn't always say the same things.

I brought tequila once, and we both did shots. He didn't talk and I didn't leave, and this time I fell asleep on his couch and I woke up with Bernard's hot breath on my eyelashes.

The teller who calls the cops, her name is Irene. Irene something I don't remember, but because of her hair and her attitude I called her Irene Supreme, and she's a lesbian. She was a lesbian. Her girlfriend was a cashier at the same Target I got fired from. Funny the coincidences I run across. One of the other tellers lived in Skinner's building. The tall Asian guy. Or maybe he was the one who owned the dog. Someone had a dog. A dog in a yard.

Skinner walked before work. He walked every day I followed him, and every day he'd pat the big yellow mutt that stood up waiting for him behind a chain link fence, maybe four blocks away from his building. Somebody's idea of a security dog.

Once he gave it half his bran muffin.

The dog's name is Stan. That's what his collar says, anyway.

So I took Skinner home and this time I brought Guinness. Bitter and dark and there was something right about drinking it at nine in the morning, and this time, he drank two in silence and began to cry. He told me that Mulder had believed in him, that Scully hadn't, but had backed him anyway. That he didn't know who he'd been most grateful to at the time.

I went home; he was still crying when I closed the front door behind me.

I brought Guinness again and he had three and he didn't cry, but he did tell me about the prostitute, about the old woman, about waking up dead. He let me sit in his lap and pet him. He sat very still, and blinked often.

I stopped bringing alcohol because my headaches were getting too bad, and every day the same hangover.

And it never rained. Hasn't yet. Not in all the days I woke to Monday. I thought about slipping in the shower, about drowning. About holding Bernard's head in the toilet until he stops kicking.

I poisoned his coffee, but he spilled it. Three days in a row, while he was still sleeping, I tried to shoot him with his own fucking fucking gun, but it jammed every time. Every time.

I thought about messing with the brakes to the car, hoped we would die, and take maybe only one or two others with us, but it was too risky.

What if Bernard was indestructible? What if he had been made invulnerable by God, and if I died in the accident he just walked away, walked the rest of the way to the bank, blew everybody to kingdom come?

I stopped looking for the bomb. I don't know where he gets the dynamite, or where he keeps it. It's not in the car, or anywhere in the apartment building, or maybe it is and I'm just not meant to find it. Maybe he hides it beforehand, somewhere in the bank.

I started shaking. I hated to sleep, hated to wake up crushed against Bernard and his poor, stupid love for me. I wondered if I would be strong enough to jam a kitchen knife between his ribs.

The day I took Skinner home, the day that I undressed him and led him into his own bedroom, that was the second time I saw him cry. No, the third time.

Before I started taking him home, I followed him. Often he would stay at the crime scene, looking broken and shocked, or angry, like he wished he had a baseball bat. Sometimes he would go back to the bureau and sit in his office with the blinds drawn.

Once he drove out to see Margaret Scully, to report the death of her daughter.

Neither of them cried; Mrs. Scully didn't seem surprised. She didn't invite him in.

Once he just walked. I followed him. It was almost four by the time he stopped; he'd wandered most of the morning, only gaining direction as the sun started slanting. He sat down on the steps of a little town house, and that was the first time I saw him cry. He was still crying when his secretary came home an hour later. Her name is Kim. I recognized her from his office.

I think she let him sleep on her couch; I wanted her to let him sleep with her.

Irene's girlfriend-- her name was Marianne. It said so on her name tag. She had really short black hair and big blue eyes. Freckles on her nose. She cried when I told her. I forget now how I knew Marianne was Irene's girlfriend, but I do remember that Irene was born in Buffalo, NY and that Marianne had never met her parents.

Marianne cried every time I told her. She never once asked how I'd known, never doubted that what I said was true. I think she was a lot younger than Irene, I mean Irene wasn't more than twenty-six, but Marianne was probably closer to twenty.

I told her Irene was dead nine times before I lost my nerve.

Irene never had time to talk to me. She'd pretend I wasn't there. Just rushed past me, muttering that she was late, in such a hurry to get atomized.

Okay.

The third time Skinner cried.

The first time I made love to him, he got up immediately after and put his pants on. He wasn't wearing his glasses, and his scalp: he seems so much more naked there than anywhere else, even without his clothes on. He asked me to leave. Told me I couldn't stay the night.

The night. It was ten-thirty in the morning.

I wasn't offended; I knew about the call girl.

The second time I slept with him was the third time he cried. He knotted his hands in my hair and fucked me, fucked me so hard I think I went numb, fucked me so hard I cried, too. He let me go, kissed my hair. Apologized about four times.

I wiped his face, stroked his head. His scalp was so smooth, slippery with sweat. While he slept, I held him, petted his naked skull, told him lies to make his dreams better. He spoke her name; not the wife, he never did tell me her name, he said "Scully" as he slept.

I stayed with Skinner every night for... I don't know how many nights after that. I kept hoping I'd wake up in his bed. I kept hoping that, even when I knew Mulder was the key.

I was wrong about that, too.

I know better now.

For a while, first really, I tried Kratzgow, thinking he'd be the one who could call off the SWAT team, or better yet, keep them from coming at all.

Lieutenant Kratzgow, he's divorced. He has two dogs, and a cat. His ex-wife is a cop, too, a dispatcher at a different precinct.

Kratzgow likes bossa nova-- I picked his lock twice, petted his dogs. Retired greyhounds from the local track. He belongs to some kind of rescue league. I read his mail while the dogs nosed my pockets. The cat hid under the couch.

One of the customers, the one you can hear scream sometimes, her name I can't remember at all. The ME who pulls her body out of the wreckage sometimes finds a bullet in her shoulder or her belly.

She lives alone, and her house is full of afghans. Her thermostat is set at 65. She must crochet every fucking day.

I only spent two days with her; she bothered me more than the others.

Almost none of the people who died in the credit union kept a journal. The afghan lady did, but it was mostly about what television shows she was going to tape while she was at work, and when she was supposed to visit her mom at the nursing home.

Scully also lives alone; Mulder has a huge water bed, big enough for him and a bunch of circus performers. It must have leaked; there are usually carpeting guys and people knocking down dry wall on the first floor of his building.

Mulder has college textbooks and a stockpile of porn magazines. Scully was reading Animal Dreams or The Giant's House \- both of them were paperbacks with creased spines. Probably she bought them at an airport newsstand. According to the records on the internet, the ones I found when I was at the library, she and Mulder spent a lot of time on planes.

Scully doesn't have any pets, but I found a frayed collar and a little dog dish, so she probably used to. She has pictures of her family, only a few with her in them, and none of Mulder. Mulder has no pictures at all. Well, one. At his office, there's a picture of a little girl. Maybe somewhere there's an ex Mrs. Mulder, and a daughter, but I couldn't find any sign of them.

Yesterday, the ME found no bullet in either Mulder or the afghan lady.

Things change. Little details. But this feels important.

I tried every person in that building, but it never occurred to me to try them in sets. In combinations.

In pairs.

Mulder and Scully are the only two in the bank who count.

I know that now. Skinner talks to them in his sleep. I needed him to tell me that: "Mulder and Scully are the only two who count."

So I followed Scully, in the morning. After she died once, I broke into her apartment and set her clock ahead.

I think it must have worked because she was early the next morning. So early that she stopped at the Cafe Runway on the way to work, to have a cafe au lait and a bagel spread with strawberry cream cheese.

"Hey." I said.

"Good morning," she answered, glancing up at me. For the first time in... days and days... I wished that I hadn't dyed my hair, that my stockings weren't fishnets, that I'd bothered to take a shower that morning.

But if I've learned one thing from this, it's to seize the moment.

"Do you mind if I..." I show her the croissant I've purchased.

Still looking surprised, she gives me a faint nod, indicates the empty chair across from her.

"Thanks. I uh, I just hate to eat alone. Thought I'd make a new friend."

I sit down and reach across the little round table to offer her my hand, hope she isn't frightened by the way my cuticles are bleeding. I know she's a doctor, wonder if she'll pity me or maybe give me the name of a professional friend of hers who might be able to help...

I say, "Pam Driscoll."

She shakes my hand firmly, and I wonder if her nails are fake, if she chews her own cuticles when she's anxious and she says "Dana Scully."

"They have great coffee here," I say, and I sound a little desperate, but she smiles, takes a sip of her own.

"Yes, they do. A friend of mine got me hooked."

I know she means Mulder; I've been in their office, and Mulder keeps empty coffee cups in his unlocked desk drawer.

"I should probably cut back, myself. On coffee. I haven't been sleeping very well."

That earns me a concerned glance, and then a longer, appraising look, and I know she's studying me for signs of illness.

"Well, it couldn't hurt to cut back on the caffeine," she says kindly.

"Do you believe in Fate?"

She blinks at me, sets her coffee down, fidgets briefly with her napkin.

"I believe we're free to be who we are, good, bad or indifferent. So I guess I believe in free will."

"Not fate?"

She shakes her head, smiles at me again.

"Do you ever have recurring dreams?"

For a moment she looks almost angry; then her forehead smoothes again, her blue eyes widen.

"Sometimes," she allows.

"I have them every night. Well, one, every night. The same dream. Over and over and over again." I laugh nervously, stare at my croissant as I pick it apart. "I know you'll think it's crazy, but... But I had a dream about you. And a tall man in a long dark coat."

Her knuckles whiten as she scrapes away excess cream cheese from her plain bagel.

"Wait. Listen. It's not... In the dream, you die, Dana."

That's obviously a mistake; her eyes bore into me, and I can see she's angry now.

"I don't know who you are, Ms. Driscoll, and it may be that you know me, but I can assure you that you did *not*--"

"Do you believe in portents, Agent Scully?"

"Who _are_ you?" She's got her hand on my wrist before I realize that I've tumbled the chair and made for the door.

"Please," I say, and I'm going to cry again soon, "Please. Believe me. I don't _want_ it to happen. Only you can stop it. You and Agent Mulder."

I wrench my arm away and run.

She doesn't pursue me.

Not that day, or the next, or the next.

Sometimes I get more detail in, I'm able to warn her about the bank on 8th, but always she reacts badly to the idea.

"Do I know you?" Skinner asks it; Mulder, too. Scully is the only one who's sure I'm a stranger.

There's nothing to know. What does it matter, anyway? Nobody can know you.

I've been in their houses, I've met their families, but I don't know them.

And before this, before Bernard's bomb, I just never really cared, you know? Other people did what they did, and I kept to myself.

Bernard would tell me stories of how he'd built a tree house in the back yard with his brother Clem, how his mom used to work on the lines at one of the tobacco factories in North Carolina, where he grew up.

But I admit it. I never paid him much attention.

Maybe I wasted his time, I don't know. I liked Bernard okay, but we didn't have much to say to each other. Or I didn't have a lot to say.

I daydreamed a lot. About driving away in a convertible, about learning to pilot a plane, about living somewhere else.

When I was eight, my mom died of cancer. I don't remember her. My dad worked double shifts; I never saw him much. He left money and grocery lists on the kitchen table for me every week until I moved out after highschool.

I could have gone to college, but I didn't see the point.

I worked as a clerk at a Cumberland Farms and got held up three times. The third time, the guy shot one of the customers. She didn't die, but I quit after that.

I shared apartments with people to help pay the rent, but I was never on the lease. I only knew their last names because I used to bring the mail in. None of my roommates had pets.

Mulder has fish. Since I've started talking to him, I feed them. I go to his apartment, as soon as he's dead, and shake in some shrimp flakes. Then I go and get Skinner.

He's easy to find. It doesn't seem to matter where I go. If I go back to the crime scene, he'll still be there. If I drive to the Hoover building instead, and ask to see him, they always let me go up, and he's waiting for me.

Once, I just went straight to his apartment; the security combination in the lobby is different for each resident. Skinner's is 0604.

Every night I sleep in Skinner's arms now. He's never asked my name.

Two mornings ago, Mulder recognized me.

Yesterday, that is today, because it's always today, Scully let me talk to her about the bank, and about staying away from it.

Today, I'm taking Skinner home.

I like his bed; his sheets are always clean. Our bed at home always smelled sour, faintly of bleach from the chemicals Bernard used to mop floors.

Bernard.

Bernard loved me as soon as I let him say my name. He was a cook at a Pizza Hut and he saw me one night with my sister's kids, and he sent me a pitcher of Dr. Pepper and some toys for them. He had the disher ask me to meet him around back on his smoke break.

Bernard didn't smoke, but he always took a smoke break.

He asked me out and I said yes, because I could tell that he wanted me more than I wanted to say no.

Three months later I lost my job at Target and Bernard asked me to move in with him; he'd quit the Pizza Hut about a week after we started dating, took a janitor position at the local junior college. Said he wanted to spend his afternoons with me.

Oh, he loved me.

Skinner barely knows I'm in the room with him some days. "Do I know you?" He asks sometimes, echoing his words in the morning, when I beg him every day to keep the SWAT team from storming the bank. He's never really _looked_ at me. He touches me as if he's wondering if I'm solid.

Bernard only touched me in bed. But then he held _on_. Held on so tight I knew there was no getting away from him.

Doomed. That's me.

That first explosion left me bleeding and almost deaf; I'd never gotten out of the car, and the windows...

But it started when I turned the key, and I drove away, and kept on driving. I had eight dollars in my pocket that first morning, and I drove 'til I emptied the tank and then I filled it up again and drove some more, and by the third morning of waking to a Monday, to Bernard, even though I'd gone to sleep four states away, I _knew_ that I was supposed to do something to prevent it...

And now I'm damned for a coward, because I ran every day that first week of Mondays, every fucking day, I even fell asleep on a transatlantic flight, and always, always woke up to Bernard's desperate, musty breath against my skin.

Cowards die a thousand deaths.

My whole life, I was indifferent. Too afraid or too tired to really care about anybody. Now I pay for that apathy every day. I read somewhere that hell is other people; this is my penance. Feeding their pets. Trying to remember their names, their fears. Getting to know them, learning their lives.

I think it's been maybe a year already, but my sense of time isn't all that reliable. I'll never make it to a thousand; I'll be in a straight-jacket before too much longer. Or a body bag.

Today, I'm going to tell Skinner my name.

And tomorrow...

END


End file.
